The present invention refers to a method and an apparatus for manufacturing products through the use of waste materials of various kind, such as heterogeneous plastic materials, wood, minerals, etc., derived from recycling processes, differentiated waste collection systems, solid urban wastes, industrial processing scraps or by-products, and the like, such products being adapted to be used in a wide range of most varied applications, particularly though not exclusively for manufacturing structural parts and decorative finishes for office furniture as well as furniture for cinematoghraph theatres, communities, concert halls and the like.
The present invention also relates to a product obtained with the above mentioned method and the apparatus.
Currently, the fabrication of products of different type, shape and size is carried out using exactly the materials required by each respective application, such as for instance plastic materials and metal materials of various kind, natural wood or wooden materials of a traditional type, etc., and appropriately processing and shaping these materials with machines, tools and processing methods that are commonly known in the art, so that these products quite often call for the availability of raw materials that may be very expensive and, sometimes, rather difficult to find on the market.
On the other hand, the possibility also exists for products to be manufactured starting from waste materials of various kind, such as for instance metal materials, plastic materials, wood and the like deriving from sorted-out waste collection activities, industrial processing scraps and by-products, recycling processes and the like, whose composition is prevailingly made up by polyolefins (LDPE, LLDPE, HDPE, MDPE, PPO-PPC), which constitute up to approx. 80% of the total, and a heterogeneous mix of PET, PA, PVC, ABS, PS, POM and various polymer blends, wherein such materials are used either separately or in combination with the commonly used raw materials, with a resulting advantage in terms of both recovery and reuse of otherwise useless materials and reduction in overall manufacturing costs. In these cases, however, processing such heterogeneous waste materials prove extremely difficult and quite often even impossible to be completed to any acceptable appropriateness due to poor compatibility and blendability of the same materials, owing mainly to the different melting temperatures required by the various materials used, which involve the risk for the same materials to be downgraded, i.e. to suffer damages, as well as toxic or noxious substances to be possibly developed during processing.
It therefore is a main purpose of the present invention to recover and recycle heterogeneous waste materials, to be used either alone or in combination with raw materials of a traditional type, in a process for manufacturing products of various kind in which said materials are able to be effectively and homogeneously mixed or blended together in a simple manner, without giving rise to any of the above mentioned drawbacks, while thereby enabling overall costs to be reduced to a significant extent and the problems connected with the otherwise necessary disposal of the waste materials involved to be avoided.
The present invention also relates to an apparatus for implementing such a manufacturing method, as well as a product obtained with such a method and such an apparatus.